How can qualitative research be objective?

My book Qualitative Research Methods for Everyone: An Essential Toolkit is to be published by Policy Press in March. In it, I argue that:

too rigid an adherence to objectivity can be impractical and unethical, and can fail to achieve shared understandings of other world views.

If objectivity means not being biased, prejudiced or judgemental, not seeking to prove your hypotheses, notforcing your view of the world onto others, then objectivity is a good thing.

The problem is that in social science it is often understood (following positivism) as requiring distance (not getting involved), standardisation (asking everyone the same thing in the same way), and consistency and rigour (sticking to your research design, questions, and approach no matter what happens). This demonstrates a naïve and dangerous understanding of objectivity, especially given the numerous intellectual and insightful critiques of positivism that have been published since the 1960s.

If you insist on asking the same questions of everyone in the same way, and refuse to adapt as you learn more about your participants, aren’t you forcing them to think like you? Aren’t you restricting their ability and freedom to tell you something different, surprising, and useful? Might you make them feel uncomfortable, and not heard?

If you test hypotheses that were designed before you started, isn’t it your own view of the world that you are confirming? Isn’t such an approach both useless and unethical?

Humans think and then act based on their feelings, experiences and meanings (and norms and rules); they do not simply react to external stimuli. There is no direct access to these feelings, experiences and meanings; they are not easily shared or discussed, they are complex and sometimes even taboo. Norms can be internalised; expectations can be taken for granted. We all use different terms for such nebulous phenomena, and these are culturally shaped. Understanding these takes time and effort, both on the part of the researcher and the participant.

Further, it is impossible to approach human agents and social life with no preconceptions at all, but we try to reduce or benefit from these through interaction, conversation and interpretation, through reflexive practice, not through imposing rigid schedules in a false attempt to be objective.

To conclude: a positivist or objectivist approach fails in its own purpose because at every step of the way it imposes the researcher’s view of the world.

Adapted from O’Reilly (2025) Qualitative Research Methods for Everyone: An Essential Toolkit, Bristol University Press